The Verdict’s In: End-user Experience Delivers Quality for Reed Smith

"The business of relationships" is more than a philosophy at Reed Smith; it’s a way of life. As the firm consolidated its data centers to a centralized Citrix platform, its IT team took care to employ a service management solution to secure the firm’s stellar reputation for servicing clients.

Reed Smith ranks among the world’s 15 largest law firms, with more than 1,300 lawyers located in 20 cities worldwide. However, this firm didn’t make The National Law Journal’s "Defense Hot List" or BTI Consulting Group’s "Client Service A-Team" by size alone. At the heart of Reed Smith is a belief in quality. "We place a high priority on building superior client relationships," says Reed Smith CIO Gary Becker. "Our lawyers aim to create comprehensive business solutions, and they need to be able to count on technology to meet our clients’ needs. This couldn’t be more important than at a time when our firm is experiencing rapid national and international expansion."

To date, the firm has 20 offices in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and the United Arab Emirates, and it plans to expand operations domestically in the U.S. Midwest. Supporting more than 450 applications currently and faced with the acquisition of additional offices in the coming year, the firm’s IT team decided to consolidate its distributed network of data centers under a centralized, Citrix-based platform. After evaluating several competing products, the firm chose Compuware Vantage. "Moving applications from a LAN to a WAN environment is not easily accomplished. The risks for major service disruptions are greater," explains Ryan McEnroe, director of Systems and Technology Operations, who also oversees the firm’s mergers and acquisitions from a technology perspective. "That’s why we need now, more than ever, to monitor and understand the end-user experience. The functionality of the Compuware tool came out on top."

With the help of Compuware, Reed Smith had Vantage up and running in no time. "Vantage was easy to install and configure, allowing us to quickly establish proactive monitoring in our environment," says Cory Cousins, Reed Smith Systems and Technology system administrator, and the lead technical architect for the Vantage deployment. "Compuware support for the Vantage products is unparalleled. When it comes to answering questions and solving problems, Compuware got back to us quickly."

No Trial and Error: Offset Problems From the Start

In the past, the only way Reed Smith knew applications didn’t work was when the help-desk phone would ring. That was the biggest fear of Frank Hervert, Reed Smith manager of Network Services. "When our lawyers and support staff walk into a room to turn the light on, they expect it to be on. It’s the same with performance," he explains. "I feared somebody was going to say the system was slow, and I had no quantitative measurement to understand what that meant from a user perspective."

Reed Smith took before-and-after snapshots of performance as offices migrated to the centralized environment. Vantage gathers traffic flow information to show network and application interaction. While it collects enterprise-wide metrics on performance and the consumption of network resources, Vantage also tracks key transactions to measure response times. Now Hervert and his team can see performance in a way they couldn’t before. For example, while Vantage monitored the system, Hervert noticed an issue with the synchronization of handheld devices, which consumed 30 percent of bandwidth. Without it, the problem would have been much more difficult to pinpoint.

When problems like these arise now, Vantage’s automatic e-mail alerts notify the appropriate teams. Bill Davidson, Reed Smith manager of Platform Technologies, can attest to that. He and his team received an alert that an abnormally large number of SQL locks were occurring on the SQL database. The Reed Smith team found a parameter originating in their document management application that would lock every record as it read it. "What typically would take weeks for our teams to uncover, they did in hours with Vantage," he says. "Vantage helped us see what was occurring behind the scenes, so we could go back to the vendor with real data and get a resolution quickly." Prior to Vantage, "when we’d get reports that applications were slow or not working, our folks had to scramble for information," explains Hervert. "It could be the network, application or server, but without having some data pointing to it, we were all over the board. Vantage provides a common interface that helps us partner with the right people to address problems quickly."

McEnroe has been nothing but satisfied with his team’s results."What we’ve gained from the Compuware suite has made us much more efficient. Vantage gets us to the point of the issue faster. If an issue pops up, we know who was alerted and the problem is being worked on. That gives us the information to service our lawyers better," he says. "Vantage not only provides an alerting capability, but also a service validation capability. Our commitment to the firm was performance would remain as good as or better than it was. With Vantage, we’re able to show that with real data."

Future Focus

Although the firm successfully migrated roughly one-third of its U.S.-based offices to the new centralized system, it is far from reaching its goal. "We are poised to continue to migrate our much larger offices in the coming year, and then put this same design into our European data center operations," says Hervert. "We’ve only begun to touch on the capabilities of Vantage; there is so much more potential we can tap into."

As the firm grows, Reed Smith will continually look to Vantage to help them plan wisely. "The consolidated model is our future, and that’s where we really need Vantage. We have a lot more eggs in our basket, but our basket—our infrastructure—is much better, much sturdier," states McEnroe. "We’re already seeing the benefits of the tool. As we continue to migrate other offices, the Vantage tool set migrates as well. Compuware is definitely in our future."